Although Swarth's professional career only lasted about thirty years,
in that period of time he was able to produce some two hundred published
writings. Almost all of these were on birds (though he also wrote on mammals
from time to time); most were book reviews or notes that dealt with various
distributional or life history data, but he also came out with a fair
number of longer general faunal reviews and field collection reports.
Swarth spent a good amount of time in the field (especially in northwestern
North America), involving himself in over a dozen significant expeditions,
and discovering and naming over forty species of birds and mammals. He
was a frequent collaborator with Joseph Grinnell.

Life Chronology

--born in Chicago, Illinois, on 26 January 1878.
--1891: the Swarth family moves to Los Angeles
--1894-1916: various collecting activities, southern California
--1896: joins first extended natural history collecting expedition, in
Arizona
--1897-1935: associated with the Cooper Ornithological Club
--1896-1927: various collecting activities, Arizona
--1898-1934: various collecting activities, coastal areas of northwestern
North America
--1904: made an assistant in the zoology department at the Field Columbian
Museum in Chicago
--1908: accepts a position as an assistant in the Museum of Vertebrate
Zoology, Berkeley
--1910: appointed curator of birds at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
--1910-1927?: associate editor of The Condor
--1913-1916: assistant director, Museum of History, Science and Art, Los
Angeles
--1916-1927: curator of birds, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
--1927: made curator of the ornithology department, California Academy
of Sciences
--1930: attends the Seventh International Ornithological Congress, Amsterdam
--1932: head of scientific team visiting the Galapagos Islands
--dies at Berkeley, California, on 22 October 1935.